Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

No, but Sarkozy's hand-picked finance minister and American favorite Christine Lagarde was just named head of the IMF. It seems that her successor, who was critical of the value of the U.S. dollar and pulling ahead of the polls in the French election, suddenly decided to take up a new career in sexual assault at a New York hotel. How fortunate for her.

Dude, if you want to comment on French politics, fine, but at least inform yourself.

DSK has a long history as a womanizer, and he finally made the mistake of assaulting someone who didn't care about who he was in a country where these things are taken seriously. This was a long time in the making, and the only thing that requires tinfoil hats is the initial reaction of French politicians who were aghast that he was being charged with attempted rape, and not let off with a private warning.

The president hand-picks his entire cabinet. Not sure what you're trying to imply by saying "hand-picked finance minister". That's how ministers are picked. Lagarde is the American favorite, because the alternatives were pretty unpleasant - specifically, a lot of developing countries were clamoring for the job. At that point, they were happy with going with tradition - which is someone from the French financial field.

And lastly, Sarkozy is pro-US only in the context of the American bashing that is popular in French politics.

Funny how the pro-U.S. candidate always seems to win, and people who cross the U.S. always seem to end up on rape charges. In a completely unrelated story, did you hear that the ICC decided today [ibtimes.com] to prosecute Moammar Gadhafi for rape? Apparently some new evidence has come in recently linking him and his allies to all sorts of nasty sex crimes. Guess he was a womanizer too.

It seems that her successor, who was critical of the value of the U.S. dollar and pulling ahead of the polls in the French election, suddenly decided to take up a new career in sexual assault at a New York hotel.

Ignoring the other sexual assault charge from a woman many years ago as well as his long history of womanizing? Those were also US plots to discredit him, too, right?

So basically you're just a nutter ignoring the fact that he has previous sexual assault charges made against him long before he was ever going to be part of IMF and has a history of shady womanizing. No, clearly he couldn't possibly have done anything wrong despite his history. No, it's all a US government plot! IT HAS TO BE!!!

Yes, just like it was a conspiracy that the CIA propped-up numerous South American dictators and assassinated their opponents, tried to assassinate Castro several times, funded the Contras, secretly financed the Shah and his revolution, and did hundreds of other super-nasty things that stayed classified for decades after-the-fact.

And the CIA rarely assassinates high-profile figures anymore. They've found that it's much cleaner and easier to discredit them with a nice sex offense or corruption charge. Of cou

Except that reprocessing does not solve the waste disposal problem. You need to dispoese the waste from your reprocessing facility. You may spend lots of money (one billion won't be enough) to solve this too, but then some other problem with show up.
Even worse, given the probabilities that we see right now then France is due for a big accident sooner or later. That accident will be a surprise to everyone, this seems to me like the only constant in nuclear energy.

Removing these trace compounds and reforming the fuel pellets and packaging them up is really all that is necessary

Except that's a bloody difficult thing to do. You are talking about materials with a high strength, very high melting point and conditions where everything has to be done remotely in an environment that fries normal electronics. The French have had a lot of trouble with it over decades and nobody else has really tried on a serious scale. That's why all those fuel rods are lying around and ne

They will make a fortune selling power to all those countries "phasing out" nuclear power with no plan to replace it but the underpants gnomes.

... which will work fine until those countries have built enough windmills, dams and solar arrays to no longer depend on France.

... and then France will have a problem: indeed, it buys as much electricity from abroad than it sells there. Nukes can only supply base load, and for peak France mostly relies on buying back from other countries (who are constructing storage facilities as we speak).

If the French aren't careful, they might be in a world of hurt twenty years from now...

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why can nuclear power only supply base-load, instead of peak as well? I've certainly heard that solar and wind are unsuitable to supply base load, as they're not terrifically reliable, but never anything about nuclear being unable to scale to peak load.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why can nuclear power only supply base-load, instead of peak as well? I've certainly heard that solar and wind are unsuitable to supply base load, as they're not terrifically reliable, but never anything about nuclear being unable to scale to peak load.

It isn't practical to rapidly change the load on nuke reactors, because it takes a significant amount of time to ramp up and down power output. Also, it basically costs the same to run whether you are at 10% capacity or 100% capacity, so it makes sense to run them as near to full capacity as possible. Contrast that with something like a gas-fired powerplant, where you can ramp generation quickly and you are pretty much only paying for the gas you are burning.

Of course, France announced at the same time as this announcement that they will be going ahead with something like 1.5 billion euros funding renewable resources over the same period, so it isn't like they are putting all their eggs in the nuclear basket - just not abandoning it entirely as others are doing.

A good combination would then to build your new plants near high-altitude lakes. Not only can you pump water up into the lakes to store energy during lulls (and let it flow out through turbine generators during peaks), you can use them as a gravity-fed water source in case of off-site-and-on-site power failure scenarios.The turbines could also act as additional on-site power generators, giving you even more redundancy (off-site grid power, on-site diesel, on-site battery, on-site water turbine, on-site gravity-feed).

Why not run the plant at some kind of overproduction level? The overproduction could be used for water electrolysis, aluminum smelting or some other energy-intensive task that could be scaled back to meet peak power demands.

Water electrolysis could supply hydrogen which could be burned or turned to methane for longer term storage and used to also provide peak power.

These reactors are able to generate hydrogen via there temperatures alone. It would seem rather feasible to generate hydrogen and store it in large quantities to run gas turbines for peek load. Just place the peak load plant next to the nuke.

You do not want to burn hydrogen in a turbine, you do not want to store hydrogen. It embrittles everything. It leaks through anything. It is an explosive hazard. It would be far cheaper and safer to just buy and burn natural gas.

Miami, in its test, set fire to two cars, one with hydrogen and the other gasoline. While both created fires when ignited, the gasoline fire engulfed the entire car causing total damage, whereas the hydrogen flame vented vertically and failed to spread to the rest of the vehicle....Similarly, in 1997, a vehicle safety study by the automaker Ford concluded hydrogen is potentially a better fuel source than gasoline when proper controls are built into the vehicle.

Why not run the plant at some kind of overproduction level? The overproduction could be used for water electrolysis, aluminum smelting or some other energy-intensive task that could be scaled back to meet peak power demands.

Water electrolysis could supply hydrogen which could be burned or turned to methane for longer term storage and used to also provide peak power.

Intermittent "valley" purchasers will not pay higher normal rates, to the point where it doesn't make economic sense to bother offering to them.

A large capital expenditure plant doesn't make any money to pay the stockholders when you cut off the power... if you pull the plug 25% of the time, they just lost 25% of their gross revenues and probably more than 25% of their profits... So that means electricity has to be, roughly, over a quarter of their expenses and has to practically be free, to interest them

A large capital expenditure plant doesn't make any money to pay the stockholders when you cut off the power... if you pull the plug 25% of the time, they just lost 25% of their gross revenues and probably more than 25% of their profits... So that means electricity has to be, roughly, over a quarter of their expenses and has to practically be free, to interest them.

It's very important that the investors always get their cut, or they won't let us have any toys.

Nikola Tesla may have been right about everything else, but we're quite fortunate that he was wrong about his wanting to extract energy from the "wheelwork of nature [google.com]". Imagine the chaos if "investors" had to support themselves with work instead of "investment".

It's very important that the investors always get their cut, or they won't let us have any toys.

Regardless if you're doin it for dollars or gaia worship or net positive EROEI calculations, there's no point building something that takes electricity if you're intentionally not going to feed it electricity. I'm not really sure what philosophical or religious outlook supports "building something really big that is really useless"

Well you can change the power load, actually. You can do it by pumping water in faster or slower, or by fiddling with the fuel rods to produce more or less power. It depends on the reactor type (PWR and BWR respectively). France, in fact, does just this because they have more nuke capacity than baseload. The term is "load-following capability". The French PWRs can go from 30 to 100% capacity in about half an hour. We even do some of this in the US, apparently, around Chicago - which also has plenty of nuke

It isn't practical to rapidly change the load on nuke reactors, because it takes a significant amount of time to ramp up and down power output.

It's a bit more complicated than that. In principle the power output of a reactor can be brought up and down very quickly. As you insert or remove control rods the amount of fission in the reactor can change within seconds. There is some decay heat to worry about, but in principle you can bring a reactor down by 94% or so within a few seconds, and similarly up again

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why can nuclear power only supply base-load, instead of peak as well? I've certainly heard that solar and wind are unsuitable to supply base load, as they're not terrifically reliable, but never anything about nuclear being unable to scale to peak load.

The term you don't know to google for is "xenon poisoning" or the "iodine pit"

Using the most non-technical terms I can, the "ashes" from the "fire" choke it from cranking up for a couple hours when you change the power level.

Naval reactors work around it by including massive extra reactivity, meaning you have to be really freaking careful when running them. The average Homer Simpson is probably... unprepared for their rather spirited performance. The other problem is, for the sake of argument, building a naval reactor 5 times bigger than it "needs" to be is affordable. Really, it is! But building a nuke 5 times bigger than "necessary" for a base load plant will make the brains of the bean counters in finance go prompt-critical.

Using the most non-technical terms I can, the "ashes" from the "fire" choke it from cranking up for a couple hours when you change the power level.

Ok, yeah. But if it's really just a couple of hours of delay, aren't utilities by now at least that good at forecasting demand peaks? Isn't it the case that it takes a couple of days to shut down or spin up a coal-fired plant, and that they don't really have any useful range of output beyond on & off?

The trouble with nukes(true to a lesser extent of coal and oil, not true of gas turbine, not true of hydro(though some different constraints apply)) is that they do not take kindly to rapid adjustments in output power. Even when SCRAMed, they take a while to cool down, and they are sufficiently expensive(both absolutely and in terms of the ratio between capital costs + fixed costs of operation vs. variable and fuel costs) that if you aren't running them at full output except when servicing them, you are shoveling money away.

Because of that, you try to set them up so that you have nuclear capacity less than or equal to the lowest continuous(base) load on your grid, and run it at full power all the time. Then, during times of heavier usage, you fire up the cheap, fast-responding; but comparatively expensive per unit fuel gas units, or increase the flow rate at the hydro plants, or whatever.

If it came to it, you could build nukes to match your peak load; but (since you can't scale them up and down fast enough to match demand) you would have to generate continuously near peak, and then figure out something to do with the excess during off-peak. That isn't an impossible problem(if you have the geography for it, you can used pumped hydro or pressurized gas storage as relatively inefficient; but not hopeless, 'batteries', or you can try to align the demands of certain power-heavy industries toward off-peak times, or try to reduce the peak/base swing by increasing adoption of thermal storage systems in building climate control and other measures, or, worst case, just burning the excess in some huge resistors); but it isn't ideal.

Nuclear can scale as high as you wish to build it, it just can't adjust output very fast, so you either run it higher than needed in off-peak, or run it at baseload levels all the time.

2, You can use extra electricity to power water-boilers in households, and that doesn't have to be continous, it only has to meet a daily average power, with a rather low precision. (This is how it works in Hungary, but I guess it's used elsewhere as well.) This unreliable power is sold at a much cheaper rate, and uses separate wiring.

"... which will work fine until those countries have built enough windmills, dams and solar arrays to no longer depend on France."

I.e. "never". Or at least not until 2050, which is close enough. And by that time France will have newer and better reactors, most likely outperforming other alternative sources. Oh, and the world's first fusion power plant is also being built in France.

"... and then France will have a problem: indeed, it buys as much electricity from abroad than it sells there. Nukes can only su

"people that believe wind and solar can produce energy anywhere near nuclear are living in an alternate universe. The sheer amount of landspace needed for solar panels and windmills to equal the output of nuclear is staggering."

An international task force is developing six nuclear reactor technologies for deployment between 2020 and 2030. Four are fast neutron reactors.All of these operate at higher temperatures than today's reactors. In particular, four are designated for hydrogen production. [world-nuclear.org]

Don't we have a crapload of unused base load power in this world which we could use for hydrogen production?

Still, the lessons of Fukushima Daiichi are serious. There are a sizable number of reactors out there which will melt down if they lose cooling pump power. (The reactors and the pumps at Fukushima survived the earthquake and tsunami. Cooling continued until the battery bank ran down, then stopped. All the damage shown in photos is from later hydrogen explosions.) That's unacceptable. There has to be backup passive cooling.

All plants should have catalytic hydrogen recombiners [iaea.org] to prevent hydrogen explosions. There's no excuse for not having those. That should have been fixed after TMI, decades ago.

Long term storage of used fuel rods on site has got to stop. After initial cooling, those need to go to dry cask storage.

The really tough issue is evacuation zones. Indian Point in New York has 19 million people within 50 miles.

is that all reactors should have waste heat generators. Seriously. This issue would not have happened had they simply had attached one or more waste heat generators that could use the heat coming from the piles to run the pumps. Amazingly, they can only run when the nukes are running above 90C or more, which would then require cooling. Oddly, nobody is thinking that way. They put in diesel generators that require zero issues, but are likely to have more issues. Sad, sad, sad.

I wonder if any of that money will go towards moving away from uranium 235? If anything, France would be a good candidate to show the western world that thorium 232 is a viable fuel source. All we'd lose is the plutonium and we really don't need more nuclear weapons anyways. Just about everything that sucks about using uranium nuclear fuel (scarcity, goes critical if not cooled, needs to be enriched, unusable waste) would go away.

America has had multiple thorium reactors, the most famous and largest being Ft. St Vrain. The only real issue with is that GA took short cuts during construction (because it was 'safe'), and that lead to issues with alarms. After 15 years of that, PSC gave up on it and closed it.

Right now, if General Atomic chose to get back into the game, they could re-do this intelligently and be the big winners on this in under 5 years.

You can bet that France and Germany are going into the Nuclear energy business together, only the reactors will be in France. Must be that the political landscape makes this kind of shell game plausible to the German people (let's move the reactors over the border) after all French fallout wouldn't dare cross into Germany.

USA is NOT going to abandon our nukes. Simple as that. Hopefully, we will spend more on THorium R&D and soon. Likewise, we need to spend more on building a new IFR, but this time, make them SMALL (as in 300-500 MWe). By doing that, they can be constructed in a factory and then transported. In addition, rather than building brand new power plants all over the place, we simply enhance the current and shutdown ones with this new equipment. Then we are able to 'burn' all of this 'waste' fuel and simply bury

Nope. The neo-cons and tea* are far right (bordering on fascism along the lines of NAZIs), but the core of US is not rightwing. We are right of center, but not that much. However, it will come back as the economy comes back. I think that more and more Americans are learning that neo-cons and possible tea* do not have America's best interest at heart.

1. nuclear power is the only hope we have of fulfilling the planet's energy needs. getting everything from solar, wind, and hydro is a silly left wing tree hugger fantasy. in fact, nuclear power is only the first step. step two involves getting a stable mining operation in space. that's a 200 year process right there.

2. from what I've read, immigration problems, 'cultural fragmentation', and being tough on international relations are NOT leftwing strong suits. they're the ones appeasing middle eastern '

Today I got a good idea for nuclear power plants. Build them on a raised platform above ground, like an oil rig sits above the sea floor (but not so high of course), but instead of using solid struts, use flexible ones or giant shock absorbers combined with giant caster wheels in parabolic pits. This way earthquakes are no longer a problem and the risk of damage from tsunamis or floods is decreased. Also with a limited number of ramps leading up to it, security becomes easier to manage.

Is this a joke post? Putting the nuclear reactor atop a set of stilts makes an easy security target. Take out the stilts... I doubt the safety mechanisms in place will withstand an irreverent 20ft drop.

I should probably add that I'm imagining this structure being inside the power plant compound and only having the reactor and related equipment on it (even the cooling towers could be off the platform, with a small "backup cooler" on board if necessary), plus maybe a small backup control room.

Interesting. France's going to be selling nuclear power to Germany for the rest of our lives. The French are smart people. Not only have they weighed out all the environmental concerns (don't get me started about coal), but these guys are really going to cash in on energy sales. Props to you, France!